Alcibiades was the most colorful character in one of history's most exciting periods. The Athenian is about Alcibiades, in love and war, and it touches on many aspects of Ancient Greece in her finest hour. Considered the handsomest man of his generation, Alcibiades was pursued by both women and men in an era where sexuality knew no boundaries. At one time or another, throughout his extraordinary career, he was a leader in Athens, Sparta, and Persia. This is a novel in the tradition of Robert Graves and Mary Renault, but contemporary, fast-paced, sensuous, and funny. Walter Ellis has already published the definitive biography on the subject: Alcibiades (1989) Routledge, but in this novel, he has told a story that will be interesting to a broad range of readers. Socrates, Plato, Pericles, and Thucydides are only some of the characters who populate this novel, scrupulously researched, but, nonetheless, full of imaginative, fictional detail.

This is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Sarah Prescott discusses the careers of a number of key women writers of the period from 1690 to 1740, exploring the role played by geographical location, literary circles, patronage, the literary marketplace, and subscription publication in shaping patterns of female authorship. The volume also provides a wealth of detail about the circumstances which affected the careers of individual women as well as investigating the marketing, reception, and self-representation of women writers in general.

In the Eighteenth-century, critics of capitalism denounced the growth of luxury and effeminacy; supporters applauded the increase of refinement and the improved status of women. This pioneering study explores the way the association of commerce and femininity permeated cultural production. It looks at the first use of a female author as an icon of modernity in the Athenian Mercury , and reappraises works by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mandeville, Defoe, Pope and Elizabeth Carter. Samuel Richardson's novels represent the culmination of the English debate, while contemporary essays by David Hume move towards a fully-fledged enlightenment theory of feminization.

Designed to reform contemporary British society, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714) rely heavily on the representation of contemporary manners. In shaping such behavioural images, the authors made use of the satirical character sketch. Their character sketches (re)create social interactions between fictionalised representatives of moral types of men and women located in contemporary London. This study examines how Addison and Steele employed the character sketch to create a ‘cosmography’ of (wo)man by actively engaging with the observational approaches of contemporary naturalists. Addison and Steele adapted distinctly empirical methods (e.g. induction and deduction, note taking, repeated and collective observation) and appropriated the (medico-legal) case study to communicate and disseminate socio-moral knowledge. At the same time, the character sketch served them as a means to establish a taxonomic order of the socio-moral knowledge conveyed in the texts. The study sheds new light on the literary techniques and the methodological frameworks of two journals essentially associated with the British - and the European - Enlightenment.

Discusses one of Daniel Defoe's greatest, but least known works, his periodical the "Review of the State of the British Nation". Defoe's Review played a significant role in the birth of the modern press. It was not a newspaper dealing in facts but a journal of opinion and discussion.